Where librarians and the internet meet: internet searching, Social Media tools, search engines and their development. These are my personal views.

February 28, 2010

Well, after all the fuss today, Wordle is back up and running. No details from the owner, Jonathan Feinberg as to what is going on. He's also made it clear that he won't accept any money for any purpose, so there's no point in pledging any money - I'll take down the pledge bank later.

The point of all of this of course is - don't rely on any product. While it's great to use, and fun to have out there, if you base class lessons on it, or make it an integral part of what you do, you're living dangerously. There's no saying when a resource will close, fold, be taken down or otherwise disappear. I've read some interesting tweets about how we shouldn't seek alternatives, and should stick with Wordle. I'm afraid that this is very shortsighted, unrealistic and a quite naive viewpoint.

If you're not paying for a product, however good it is, you haven't bought into it, you can't 'own' it in any way, and the owner of the resource can do pretty much what they want with it, irrespective of how many people out there like it. You have a job to do, and you DO have a relationship with your employer and/or your clients. They must always come first, and any 'touchy feely' emotions you may have about a product have to come second.

It's one of the key elements of Web 2.0 and one that I always try and stress - there's no loyalty (either way) with these resources. Use it, and move on. Or at least be prepared to move on. Always have a backup solution available - and if you check out my previous weblog entry 'Wordle closed - some alternatives' you'll see that there are some excellent alternatives to Wordle that you should play with.

So - it's great that Wordle is back, and take it as a lesson - have a backup plan, don't rely on any product and seek alternatives.

Users of the Wordle resource have been dismayed by the notice that's currently posted to the website, which states that Wordle.net is down until further notice. "I am seeking pro bono legal advice, to evaluate a trademark claim against my use of the word "Wordle" for this web site. If you're an intellectual property lawyer, with expertise in trademark law, and you wish to offer professional advice on this matter, please contact me." I think it would have been helpful if some more details had been given, since there's rumours rife on Twitter at the moment regarding who the conflict is with. Some suggest IBM (for reasons that I don't quite get), and other people are pointing a finger at the producers of an app called Wordle, which has been submitted as an app to the Apps store. I've left a comment on their blog page asking them to clarify this - boycott suggestions are already appearing on Twitter, so they're going to dragged into this one way or another. [Edit to add: There is a live trademark for the use of the word owned by an American photographer - but no idea if he's involved with this issue at all.]

It's also worth saying that this doesn't mean that Wordle is 'dead'. I think it's really stupid and irresponsible of people to say that it is. 'Down until further notice' does not mean 'dead' - it means, oddly enough, that it's down until further notice. Even if it can't continue under that name there's no reason why it shouldn't come back under another name.

Meanwhile, what are the alternatives to Wordle? There are a variety of choices that people may wish to consider.

TagCrowd is a free alternative that can be used without any kind of registration. It's simple to use, though more limited than Wordle, since users can't fine control the output. However, results can be saved, embedded onto blogs and websites or kept as a PDF. I used the Gettysburg Address as my sample text, and this is what I got:

This is ok, but not that exciting. Users can't control the colours or positioning, but they can choose the maximum number of words to use, include a stop word list, and can group similar words together.

WordSift is another resource that's worth trying out. The same text produced the following cloud:

Again, not terribly exciting, but WordSift does give you more options than just a word cloud. Words can be dragged around the screen for example, so if you don't like the way in which something is displayed you can always change it. Sorting is also possible - common to rare, rare to common, A-Z, Z-A. The tag cloud words can also be marked up, either custom, or according to categories such as Language, Science, Maths or Social Studies. This simply pops the words into a different colour, but it's a very useful training aid in the classroom.

WordSift does more than this however - there is much more detail available to users. Under the word cloud there are images appropriate to the words in the cloud, and these can be clicked and dragged into a sandbox on the same page. Users can also search for a particular word in the Visual Thesaurus that's on the site, in order to see the relationships between different terms.

If you're a teacher, WordSift is a tremendous resource, and there's no registration required. It's also worth saying that it's been produced by Stanford University as well, so it has a good pedigree. The main disadvantage that I can see is that it's not easy to save the word cloud unless you use a 3rd party application. That's disappointing.

ABCya! is another option. Simply type/paste your words into the box and it will create a cloud for you. Unlike Wordle, it's not possible to link to a URL RSS feed, which is a shame, but not dreadful. This is the cloud that it produced for me:

Much more Wordle like! Moreover, the cloud can be randomised, the fonts changed, the colours altered, the layout can also be changed. No registration required and it's free. If you want as close a Wordle experience as possible, this is probably the best one to try.

Tagul is a similar resource, but with significant differences. Mouseover words and they will flick into horizontal and will be zoomed, so it's visually quite exciting. Clicking on the term you've chosen will then lead to a Google search for it, but it's possible to link to other sites or pages instead. In order to use the service registration is required and you're limited to 10 clouds. Words can be pasted in to be used, or users can provide a URL instead. Users can choose the shape of the cloud, font, angles of words. An example is below - I kept as much as possible to defaults in order to ensure a fair comparision.

Clouds can be embedded, but the resource does require some work and thought to get the most out of it. If you're a teacher you'd be best advised to prepare the cloud prior to a lesson, unlike other resources that will just pull up a cloud for you.

WordItOut is another resource that you can just use directly, without registration. Words can be pasted, or you can provide a URL to the application. Colours can be changed, as can font, size, number of colours, but layout doesn't appear as an option. This is what you get:

Clouds can be saved, but you need to provide an email address, but once you have, you're given a URL for the cloud that's been created, so that makes it very easy to reuse.

ImageChef word mosaic is another alternative that I've found. This one is again slightly different in that you can choose to create a cloud in a specific shape - a heart, exclaimation mark, envelope, skull and so on. It's quite a 'pop' type site, with options for changing shapes, colours and fonts. Very easy to save, share on Twitter, email and so on. If you're working with children this is certainly worth exploring. My text is so inappropriate for the default options of heart and pink/black, but again, I'm trying my best to keep out of any designing myself for this review.

TagCloud builder is a project of OCLC Research. Another fairly basic resource, and it arranges words alphabetically, so it's not very visually exciting. You can however change colours, group like words and save the results. Here's the Gettysburg address again:

Tag Cloud is a nice resource, but limited in that you can't give it some words to paste - you have to give it a URL, so I provided it with a page that had the Address text on it, which is as close as I could get to a fair comparison. You can change the font size and minimum word count, but that's your lot. This one did however provide both a static cloud and a flash version, so I've included that for a bit of difference. You can mouse over it, to move the words around, so it's quite fun. It's not quite as messy as it looks!

VocabGrabber is more like WordSift, since it takes some text and provides more information about the words used. It gives a word list, definitions of words, and it's possible to sort for relevance, A-Z, occurrences and familiarity. The results page looks like this:

So - a roundup of options. But let's hope that Wordle comes back soon,
shall we? While I liked several of the options, I still find Wordle the
most flexible and easy to use.

February 25, 2010

True Knowledge "is a pioneer in a new class of search technology that allows you to ask questions on
the web, just as if you were talking to another human being.

Rather than trying to guess keywords to find the information you are looking for, you simply
ask True Knowledge the question you want to ask. Our answer engine does not simply
guess at relevant web pages, but rather understands the meaning behind your question:
drawing inferences and conclusions when needed to find the answer you are looking for. True
Knowledge is tapping subject matter experts around the globe to build its information
repository - bringing together the benefits of machine-driven automation and people-driven
intelligence"

It's clearly best at factual data - how many feet is 60 inches, population of London and so on. It tends to fail, not surprisingly with touchy feely questions, such as 'which is better, a or b?' The answers it gives are reasonable. A search for 'what is twitter' gives straight forward functional information, such as business type, website, email address, wikipedia page and so on. Users can log in and give their own answers as wel, and these can be voted up or down. There are also links to other sites, such as ChaCha, Wikianswers, Answerbag and so on.

I prefer Trueknowledge to ChaCha - the answers are more indepth and factually useful. I asked the question "What is the population of London?" and ChaCha simply said 7,518,000 without any details as to where it got that information. Trueknowledge gave the answer 7,556,900 and linked to london.gov.uk and Wikipedia. This was closer to the figures mentioned on the Mayor of London's site than the ChaCha offering.

However, these are not the only engines that are in this area. The obvious other one which is in the news at the moment is Aardvark which I've used for a long time. It's a nice resource since it allows users to register and list what subject areas they know about. They can also ask questions - Aardvark will then route the question to someone it thinks can answer the question. I've linked mine up to my Google account, and perhaps once a day it pops up in my chat box with a question that I can try and answer or not as I feel inclined. The strength/weakness of the service is of course that it depends on the ability of the person asking the question, so rather than asking factual questions, Aardvark is the place that I'd go for the 'is a or b better?' I've asked questions about vegetarian food and game software, and answered a wide variety, mostly in the internet area.

Of course, if you don't like any of those, you could try Mahalo. I have a personal bias here in that I don't like Mahalo. The ask question element is right at the top of the screen, so you merrily ask the question, categorise it and only then do you get prompted to log in or create an account. I tried searching Mahalo for my London population question and got no answers at all. However, when I asked the question on the home page I had results from Wikipedia and a school website page. Admittedly there were links to news information, images and videos. I had to hunt around in order to get somewhere.

So - a few different engines to try. None of them perfect, but this is the internet, what else can you expect?

I took a look at Feedeep today, and started by looking at their introductory video. I was really impressed, and keen to try it out. The things that I liked about it were that you could sort results by language, image, videos, by date (if there was an event for example) and audio. Users could click on the image option and see pictures directly in a popout box which was a quite cool idea. There's a social media element as a Twitter box pops up with tweets about your search subject. Moreover, you can link your account, click and drag webpages, images into tweets and so on. There are plugins that you can add - games, weather, tag clouds and so on. Really exciting stuff. This is the results screen:

Unfortunately, the reality is much below the hype. The first search that I ran resulted in page after page of Wikipedia results. One I can handle, pages of them is unacceptable. I did a search for Madeira, and got really rubbish results; nothing that related to the disaster it suffered recently. Clicking on an image option pulls up the pictures from a page, but it was almost impossible to then get rid of it. Clicking on the Twitter option took me back to the home page. Not exactly what I was expecting. The 'cloud tag' option wasn't - it was a listing of previous searches.

Worst though, and why I'm suggesting you steer clear, is the results. I've already mentioned it, but just look at what we're getting for 'librarians'. It's absolute nonsense I'm afraid to say. This search engine just doesn't cut it. It's got all the right ideas, and if it did what it was supposed to I'd be singing its praises, but it falls very far short. I should have gone with my split second impression when I first saw the logo and home page - a very poor impression of Google was what I thought. And I was right.

Rhymes.net. Budding poet? Or just in need of a rhyme? Rhymes.net is another excellent resource from the reference stable that covers Abbreviations, Conversions, References and Synonyms, amongst others. In common with those, it does a simple job very well. Simply choose your word, and it will provide rhymes arranged alphabetically and categorised by syllable length. Not only will it do dictionary words it provides others - one random example being 'Fonda', defined as 'film actress, daughter of Henry Fonda.'

Rhymes.net also provides a translation tool into any of 20 languages. There's an audio option so that you can hear the word being spoken, although the accent is quite a strong American accent. Images are also made available and you can scroll through them, though I do have one or two gripes here - you can't enlarge the images, go back to see previous ones or see the origins of the images.

I recently stumbled across PeopleBrowsr or pb.ly as they like to style themselves. It's a flexible site, since it is designed for searchers to hunt for data in tweets, biography, 'authority' (whatever that is), links, sentiment and lists. There's an Advanced search function which is basically just search.twitter.com rebadged, so it allows location search and date search as extras.

It looks nice, seems to work well - it picked up tweets that I sent a few minutes prior, and the layout of results is nice:

I couldn't get the 'live trending' option to work unfortunately, but otherwise I liked it. The lists function I particularly liked. If you're looking for a good general allround Twitter search engine, with an emphasis on people, this is worth trying out.

February 22, 2010

Regain control over your account! If you've been unfortunate enough to find out that your Twitter account has become compromised you need to take steps to ensure that you've got control over it. I've written a short article plus screencast on the steps that you need to take in order to do this. It'll take you a couple of minutes of your time but will save you a lifetime of embarassment!

February 20, 2010

Oh dear oh dear, it's really not a good evening for the BBC. The Virtual Revolution programme suggested that we should all wander along and answer a quiz to find out what kind of animals we are. (Heck, I could probably answer that for a few people without the benefit of a quiz!) Now, it doesn't take a genius to work out that a huge number of people are going to be interested enough to try it out. 2.5 hours later and the site is still down. Doesn't surprise me, doesn't surprise you, but clearly it took the Beeb by surprise. Why? Can't they estimate server load? Not only that, but their editorial department isn't too hot on spelling. This is just sad!

Really nice resource called Vuvox, which allows you to create collages. It's a lovely alternative to Powerpoint, and while it doesn't have the same flexibility as Prezi it doesn't make me feel so ill watching it. Very simple to add material, annotate, add in music or YouTube videos, and embed elsewhere. Here's one that I knocked up today.